Professor Lucy Suchman is a sociologist and anthropologist now working at the University of Lancaster following twenty years as a reseracher at Xerox’s Palo Alto Research Centre. Her work is concerned with the intersection of body, embodiment, and technology – principally the ‘relations of ethnographies of everyday practice to new technology design.
Professor Suchman runs courses at Lancaster on Virtual Cultures and a graduate course on the Antropology of Cybercultures – she also teachers in Gender studies and feminist theory.
Her work at Xerox ‘combined ethnographic studies of work and technologies-in-use with the in-situ development of new prototype information systems’.
Professor Suchmann has written two books on the human-machine nexus. The first based on her Dissertation, Plan and Situated Actions: the problem of human-machine communication (1987) and the second a reprise or sequel of the first Human-Machine Reconfigurations: plans and Situated Actions 2nd Edition (2007).